its rather noisy way past them and continued on. 'I think,' she said when they were alone again, 'I had better marry you.' His hands came to rest lightly on her hips. 'Because you find me pathetic?' he asked. 'Because I find you anything /but/,' she said. 'You need some peace in your life, Lord Sheringford. So do I.' /'Peace,'/ he said. 'That is a word from a long-ago past. And you think marriage to you will bring me that, Maggie?' 'Life at Woodbine Park will,' she said. 'And unfortunately for you, that can be achieved only at the expense of marriage to me – or to someone else you may be able to find in the next week or so. I would be better for you than anyone else, though. I know the truth about you and can respect you, even admire you.' His arms circled her waist as he sighed. 'Don't make the mistake of believing that you know me now any more fully than you did before,' he said. 'You merely know a few more facts.' 'Oh, there you are wrong,' she told him, sliding her own arms as far about him as the tree at his back would allow. 'I know more than facts now. I know /you/. Or at least I am on the way to knowing you.' 'And you believe I can bring you /peace/?' For a moment she felt his cheek against the top of her head. 'Or that Woodbine can?' 'I have no real way of knowing,' she said. 'We can never know the future. We can only take calculated risks.' She lifted her forehead from his shoulder and looked into his eyes. '/Very/ risky,' he said. 'The world will always despise me, Maggie – and you too if you marry me.' She smiled at him. 'You have been desperate to persuade me to marry you,' she said. 'Are you now trying to persuade me /not/ to?' He set his head back against the tree and closed his eyes. 'Reality creeps up on one, does it not?' he said. 'For a few days – is it two or three or more? I have lost count already. For a few days, anyway, I have been desperate to do whatever I must do to prevent the loss of Woodbine. And yet now, when it seems that what I want is within my grasp, the reality comes home to me that I can do it only at the expense of the happiness of another innocent.' 'You believe,' she said, 'that I will be unhappy as your wife, then?' 'How can you not be?' he said without opening his eyes. 'We have known each other for two or three or four days – which /is/ it? For a very brief time, anyway. I have only mercenary reasons for wishing to marry you. I believe I like you, though it is only this evening that I have come to that opinion. I do not love you. How could I? I do not /know/ you and I have become an incurable cynic where romantic love is concerned. And you do not know me. You have lived an ordered, decorous life with a close, affectionate family. You have always been very well respected. It is possible that you still love a man who has angered you. You would be stepping into a yawning unknown with a social pariah if you married me.' He was right about everything – except Crispin. So very right. She did not know quite why retaining possession of Woodbine Park /now/ was so important to him since it would be his eventually anyway, along with a great deal more, and in the meanwhile he was young and fit and surely capable of earning a perfectly decent living. But however it was – perhaps it was just his reaction to a long exile, now over – Woodbine /was/ important. Yet she sensed that if she said no now, he would walk away from it. If he could not bring himself in all conscience to marry her purely for his own convenience, then he would not be able to do it with anyone else.
It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was after all a man of tender conscience. Perhaps more than usually so. He had pitted his conscience against the whole of his world five years ago. 'I will marry you if you still wish to marry,' she said. 'But only /if/.
You must not now feel that you are obliged to wed me only because you made me an offer which I have accepted. /If/ you wish to marry, then I will marry you. I will take a chance on the future.' He had opened his eyes though he had not moved his head. He was looking steadily back into her own eyes. His looked very black. His face looked very severe and angular in the darkness. A few days ago she might have been frightened. 'I wish to marry you,' he said. 'I would ask only one thing,' she said, 'and this I beg of you as a great favor. Allow me to tell my family what you have told me tonight – Stephen, Vanessa and Elliott, Katherine and Jasper. I would stake my life on their honor and discretion, on the fact that not one of them will say a word to anyone else without your express permission. But I really cannot bear to have them believe that I am marrying an unconscionable villain. I cannot bear their puzzlement and pity. And I cannot bear that they will dislike and despise and avoid you for the rest of our lives.' He sighed. 'They will think just as badly of me, Maggie,' he said. 'Moreland will, at least. And Merton. Probably your sisters too.' 'No, they will not,' she said. 'No, /they will not/.' He lifted one hand and set his knuckles lightly against one of her cheeks. 'It must be wonderful,' he said, 'to be so innocent, still to have such faith in the world.' She leaned her cheek into his hand. 'If I were to lose faith in my own family,' she said, 'I might as well be dead.' He dipped his head toward hers and kissed her. His lips were warm, soft, moist, and moved over her own, parting and deepening the pressure as one arm came about her shoulders and the other tightened about her waist.
Oh, she liked kisses without ferocity, she thought – just as he raised his head. 'You wish to marry me, then, Maggie?' he asked. 'And by the same token bed with me nightly?' He was, she realized, waiting for an answer. It was a good thing he could not see the color of her cheeks. 'Yes,' she said. And an aching weakness between her thighs assured her that she was not lying. Yes, she wanted to bed with him. Nightly. She did not love him any more than he loved her, but … Oh, but she wanted to be /married/ to him. She found him strangely attractive. She wanted to go to bed with him.
She verbalized the admission in her mind and felt breathlessly wicked.
But it was not wicked. She was going to be his wife. 'Kiss me, then,' he said. 'I just /was/ kissing you,' she protested. 'No, you were not,' he said. 'You were holding your mouth relaxed for my pleasure, just as you did yesterday afternoon in the park. I do not want a passive, submissive woman. There are too many of those in the world, forced to it by the demands of their menfolk. /My/ wife will not be one of them. If you wish to marry me, if you wish to bed with me on our wedding night and every night thereafter when we are both in the mood for sex, then kiss me now as if you mean it.' And the thing was that he was neither joking nor teasing. His face and his voice both attested to that fact.
Just as he had not been joking or teasing at the Tindell ball when he had offered her marriage within a minute or two of colliding with her.
He was not someone, then, who took kisses as if it were his right to do so. 'Kiss me,' he said softly. 'We are on the /street/,' she reminded him. 'And everyone in the neighborhood is either asleep or still out carousing,' he said. 'There is not a single light in a single window.
And if there is a Peeping Tom behind one of the darkened ones, he is having lean pickings tonight. We must be almost totally invisible beneath this tree. Maggie, you are either a coward or you do not wish to kiss me. And if it is the latter, then you do not wish to bed with me either and therefore do not wish to marry me.' She laughed. 'Which is it?' he asked.
She gripped his upper arms, leaned forward, and set her lips firmly to his. She was instantly more fully aware of the hardness of his thighs against her own, of his broad chest pressed to her bosom, of the wine flavor of his mouth and the warmth of his breath.
His lips remained still and passive against hers, and after a few moments she was at a loss. She drew back her head. 'Oh, dear,' she said, 'I suppose you are demonstrating the way /I/ was kissing /you/. I am so sorry. It is just, you see – ' His mouth covered hers again, and she leaned deliberately into him and burrowed the fingers of one hand into the back of his hair beneath his tall silk hat, angling her head slightly as she did so and parting her lips, moving them over his, touching his lips with her tongue and then venturing within them until his arms tightened about her and he sucked her tongue into his mouth while his hands slid downward to spread over her buttocks and half lift her against him.
He was ready for her. Oh, dear God, he was … She drew firmly away from him. 'Frightened?' he murmured. 'Yes,' she said. 'And also aware that we are on the street even if we /are/ invisible to Peeping Toms.' 'The voice of reason,' he said, brushing his hands over his clothes and stepping away from the tree trunk. 'But you need not be afraid, Maggie.
We may be marrying for all the wrong reasons – though I am no longer sure what /right/ reasons there can be for matrimony – but we can still expect pleasure from our union. It is obvious that pleasure is within our grasp.' 'Yes,' she said, and she saw the flash of his teeth in the darkness. 'Are we going to remain here forever? Soon we will be sending down roots to join the trees.' He offered his arm, and they resumed their walk home to Berkeley Square. 'Tomorrow,' he said, 'I shall take you to meet my grandfather, if I may.
It may be rather like ushering Daniel into the lions' den, I am afraid, though he will have no reason to turn his wrath upon /you/. The day after I will have an announcement of our betrothal appear in the morning papers.' It was all very real indeed now. 'Yes,' she said. 'That will be satisfactory.' 'And then,' he said as they came to a stop outside the doors of Merton House, 'I shall purchase a special license and we will decide upon a suitable day for the nuptials. I believe there will be ten or so among which to choose.' 'Yes,' she said. 'I am not sure you answered my question. /May/ I tell my family what you told me tonight?' He hesitated. 'Yes,' he said, and leaned
